This blog is about my new Civil War history, Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Hannah Duston took an axe

Last weekend I made my seventh fall pilgrimage to Colby
College, where I serve on the committee that selects the winner of the Elijah
Parish Lovejoy award for courage in journalism. Lovejoy, valedictorian of the
Colby class of 1826, became an abolitionist editor in Ohio and was murdered in
1837 for his antislavery editorials. The award honors his legacy.

"Hannah Duston Killing the Indians" (1847), by Julius Brutus Stearns.

The dogged reporting of this year’s winner, the online
journalist A.C. Thompson, disclosed the callous and lethal misbehavior of some
New Orleans police officers after Hurricane Katrina. Thompson gave a fine talk
in Colby’s hilltop Lorimer Chapel, where he received the award and an honorary
degree.

For art lovers like my wife Monique and me, my position on the
Lovejoy selection committee has a fringe benefit. The Colby Museum of Art is
superb. We have visited it on six of our trips to the college. A recent renovation
and expansion have made it even bigger and better.

The heart of the collection is American. Especially if you
like 19th and 20th century art, you’ll find many pleasant surprises in the
museum galleries, including work by George Inness, Frederic Remington, Mary
Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. The collection is especially
strong in paintings by artists with Maine roots or connections – Winslow Homer,
Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Frederic Edwin Church, to name a few.

On this trip I lingered over a single painting that struck
close to home. It is titled “Hannah Duston Killing the Indians.” Julius Brutus
Stearns, a Vermont-born artist I had never heard of, painted it in 1847. This
was a century and a half after Hannah Duston killed the Indians.

By coincidence, the morning after I saw the painting, a
story on the front page of the Concord
Monitor, my hometown newspaper, detailed the latest controversy about the
Hannah Duston Memorial State Historic Site. I have visited Duston’s statue there
several times. Erected on or near the spot where Duston killed the Indians in
1697, it is about a mile from the offices of the Monitor, which I edited for 30 years. Graffiti and trash on the Duston
site have caused outrage and official hand-wringing for as long as I can
remember.

The Hannah Duston statue on Contoocook Island

Now two bills before the Legislature seek to remedy these
problems and to broaden the way the site tells the Duston story. As reported by
Kathleen Ronayne of the Monitor, one bill would strike Duston’s
name from the site and call the little park Contoocook Island State Historic Site. The bill
also calls for more information at the site about the Abenaki tribe, which
lived in the region before white settlers pushed them out.

The proposed name change in particular is a red flag to the
historical society in Boscawen, the town where the Duston statue was dedicated
in 1874. “I would think we’d probably fight this tooth and nail,” Bruce
Crawford, the society’s chairman, told Ronayne.

As well they should. The effort to clean the place up and
provide more context about the Native Americans who lived there is welcome.
More information about the way the Duston story has been told over time would
also be welcome. But a generic name for the site? No thanks.

The Stearns painting at the Colby Museum of Art captures the
way the Duston story was used in the 19th century as a model for the
justifiable slaying of savages. At the time it was painted, destruction of
native peoples was already the basis of U.S. policy. Although the painting is
inaccurate in its details, the Duston’s actions were certainly a brave response
to savage treatment.

The Abenakis captured Duston, her nursemaid Mary Neff and
her 6-day-old baby during an attack on Haverhill, Mass., in March 1697. By Duston’s
account, they dashed the baby’s brains out against a tree. Duston’s husband and
seven other children avoided capture. The captors comprised a family of 12: two
warriors, three women, seven children. One of the children was a 14-year-old
white colonist whom the Abenakis had kidnapped earlier.

After a couple of days’ travel, the party stopped on
Contoocook Island to rest. As the captors slept, Duston, Neff and the 14-year-old
boy killed them with clubs and tomahawks. Of the 11 Abenakis other than the
14-year-old, only an old woman and one child escaped. Duston took the scalps of
the dead back to Haverhill, where she received a substantial bounty for them.

Shortly after her escape, Duston told her story to Cotton
Mather, an influential Puritan preacher and writer on Boston. He included it in
a book published in 1702. Mather held Duston up as a frontier hero and
considered her act a wonder of Christian resolve.

Stearns’s “Hannah Duston Killing the Indians” omitted any
depiction of Duston’s having killed women and children. Otherwise, it reflects
little change in white Americans’ attitudes toward Indians in the 150 years
after Mather’s account.

In researching a chapter in Our War about
Col. Edward E. Cross Indian-fighting days, I found a quotation from a
journalist who went west to Arizona with Cross in 1859. As white Americans
attempted to settle the area obtained through the Gadsden Purchase, the
journalist Turner M. Thompson, spelled out the Western version of an Indian
policy long familiar in the East:

“Place the Indians on reservations north of the Rio Gila,
establish military posts along their limits, and shoot every Indian found off
the reservations. No other plan short of total extermination in an
indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children, will rid the country of
their continued depredations.”

The Hannah Duston State Memorial Site is an excellent place
to examine the clash of cultures that led to this policy and to the
near-extermination of Native Americans. This can be done without diminishing
Duston’s courageous act of self-preservation.

Making the site a more popular destination and keeping it
free of vandalism are good goals. But the best way to treat the history Duston
represents is to explain it. To sugarcoat the clash between the original
inhabitants of America and the Puritan immigrants who took it over would be a
travesty and a missed opportunity.